Elon Musk begins to restore several Twitter accounts belonging to famous journalists that were blocked. The lifting of this block was made after Musk conducted a poll on Twitter.
In the poll, Musk asked about canceling the suspension of an account that has doxxed its location in real time. The first poll was dominated by respondents whose suspensions were lifted now. But Musk reversed the poll results because he thought the options were too many.
After that he created a second poll with the same question. As a result, 58.7% of respondents voted to lift the block, with a total of nearly 3.7 million votes.
"The people have been talking. The suspension of the account doxxing my location will be lifted now," Musk said in a tweet, as quoted by The Guardian, Sunday (18/12/2022).
Advertisements
The people have spoken.
Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now. https://t.co/MFdXbEQFCe
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2022
As previously reported, Twitter blocked accounts belonging to The New York Times journalist Ryan Mac, CNN journalist Donie O'Sullivan, Mashable journalist Matt Binder, The Washington Post journalist Drew Harwell, and independent journalist Aaron Rupar.
Musk claimed the journalist whose account was blocked had doxxed his location thereby putting his family at risk. Even though these journalists only wrote articles about blocking the Twitter account @ElonJet which tracked the location of Musk's private plane, without information about the real-time location of Musk or his family.
The @ElonJet account run by student Jack Sweeney shares flight information for Musk's private jet using publicly available data via air traffic databases. Currently the accounts of @ElonJet and several other journalists are still blocked.
Musk claimed that information about the location of his private plane led to a stalker following the car his son X was traveling in. However, Los Angeles Police said there were no criminal reports related to the incident.
Twitter then released a new policy that prohibits its users from sharing other users' real-time location information, as well as sharing links for URLs of travel routes from third parties.